Everything Apple announced at WWDC 2019
Don’t have time to watch the two-hour presentation? Here’s a breakdown of Apple’s announcements. Jason Cross reports
Apple’s big WWDC keynote is over, and the tech giant had a lot to say in its over-two-hour presentation. If, however, you don’t have time to sit through the whole thing and want to catch up quickly, here’s a summary of the highlights.
tvOS
Apple kicked off the conference by talking about updates to tvOS, which runs on its Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K products. It was recently given a refresh with the new TV app (see page 75), and now Apple is giving us a look at how the entire operating system will change in the autumn.
New home screen:
The Apple TV home screen will now play full-screen preview video that suggests content you may want to watch.
Multi-user support:
You can add multiple users to your Apple TV and they’ll each get their own personalized
suggestions and use their own Apple Music playlists and recommendations.
Control Centre:
A new Control Centre slides in from the right side of the screen, giving you quick access to changing users, lets you dim the display, and more.
Lyrics in sync with Apple Music:
Apple Music’s lyrics now sync up with the song. Perfect for karaoke night.
Game controller support:
Apple TV will support the Xbox One controller (newer models with Bluetooth) and the PS4 DualShock controller. This support is coming to iPhone and iPad, too.
Undersea screen savers:
Apple partnered with the BBC’s Natural History Unit to shoot 4K HDR underwater footage to make new screen savers.
watchOS 6
Apple Watch got a lot better with the Series 4, and watchOS 6 takes it a big leap forward. Apple is aiming to make this a whole platform unto itself. For more about what’s new in watchOS 6, see page 45.
New watch faces:
Six new faces with lots of different customization options, including colour and the choice to show full-screen or circular faces that support rich complications.
Taptic chimes:
Your Apple Watch can now tap your wrist on the hour, and play a chime if the sound is on. Apple
gave the example of a robin’s song, though we assume different faces have different chimes.
New built-in apps:
Audiobooks lets you, well, listen to audiobooks. Voice Memos comes over from iOS. Most useful is the calculator app, which includes functions for calculating tips or splitting the bill.
Independent apps:
Watch apps can run on the watch alone without needing a companion iPhone app.
Watch App Store:
There’ll be an App Store on the watch itself. Browse or search with dictation or scribble, or ask Siri. Purchase and install apps directly on your watch.
New features for developers:
Apps have an extended runtime API that lets them track motion for longer
periods of time. This means big improvements to health and fitness tracking apps. There’s also a new streaming audio API that lets music apps stream content instead of requiring you to download it.
Activity trends:
Together with the Health app on your iPhone, you can now see not just your daily activity, but how it’s trending. Apple compares your last 90 days to the past 365 to see whether you’re improving in nine key metrics.
Hearing health:
A new app on the Apple Watch will measure ambient noise and warn you if it’s loud enough to impact your hearing. You can see it in real time in the watch app or on a complication on your watch face. In order to protect your privacy, audio is only periodically sampled and never stored or saved.
Cycle tracking:
The Apple Watch and Health app on iOS can help women track their menstrual cycles, receive fertility window notifications, and even predict when their periods are about to start.
Apple briefly showed a slide with lots of other small features, such as automatic app updates, the ability to identify songs with Shazam using Siri built in to the watch, a complication that informs you of the chance of a rain, a redesigned walkie-talkie, and more.
iOS 13
Apple now produces one of the most popular and influential consumer operating systems in the world,
as iOS is on over a billion devices. As you can expect, iOS 13 is chock-full of new features. Here are the highlights from the keynote.
Performance:
Senior VP Craig Federighi said Apple worked “top to bottom… making everything faster that you do the most”. A few examples: Face ID unlocks 30 percent faster, apps are packaged differently to be 50 percent smaller (and updates are 60 percent smaller). These changes will help apps load twice as fast.
Dark Mode:
After macOS got a Dark Mode last year, iOS gets it this year. All of Apple’s apps now have no colours with dark backgrounds, and Dark Mode’s aesthetic even extends to wallpapers, widgets, and notifications.
Synced lyrics in Apple Music:
Lyrics will sync in time with the song, moving up the screen to highlight the current phrase.
QuickPath keyboard:
Swipe your finger across the letters to type, if you prefer.
Safari:
New quick font sizing options with per-website preferences.
Mail:
Much richer text formatting controls, including support for rich fonts.
Notes:
A new gallery view, support for shared folders, and much more.
Reminders:
A complete ground-up remake with intelligent text recognition for dates, times, and places. Alternatively, you can use the new QuickType bar to add those things. Tasks let you associate to-dos with a toplevel reminder. Tag people and you’ll get notifications in the Messages app when you talk to that person.
Apple Maps:
The work that began with completely overhauling Maps data in Northern California will spread to the whole US by the end of 2019, and the rest of the world in 2020. Maps also now lets you assign new favourites to quickly access them from the launch screen, or build collections of places that you can share with others. Some locations will have up-close, groundlevel 3D views called ‘Look Around’ to help you explore. Maps also gets real-time travel info, the ability to share your ETA with people, and flight status for airports.
Privacy protections:
You can allow an app to use your location just once (it will have to prompt you again next time you use it). Apple will send you warnings about apps that continue to track you in the background. And it will close the loophole that allowed apps to look at Wi-Fi hotspots and Bluetooth beacons to estimate your location without asking for it.
Sign in with Apple:
Those ‘Sign in with Google’ and ‘Sign in with Facebook’ buttons are about to be joined by one from Apple. Only, Apple won’t share any of your personal details with the app. And if the app requires an email address, you can give your real one, or Apple will generate a fake one that forwards to your real one, so the app developer won’t even get a real email address. Sign in with Apple will be available across all Apple platforms and on the web.
HomeKit Secure Video:
A new, more secure setup for home video cameras. Video is analysed in the home, then encrypted and stored on iCloud where
nobody (not even Apple) can see it. Your paid iCloud subscription comes with 10 days of storage that won’t count against your iCloud data limit. Initial products are coming from Logitech, Eufy, and Netatmo.
HomeKit routers:
Apple will licence routers to work with HomeKit accessories, firewalling each one off individually so that no single compromised device can affect others. The first HomeKit-enabled routers are coming from Linksys, Eero, and Internet provider Spectrum.
Name and image in Messages:
You can add your name and image to Messages, and then automatically share
it with your contacts, or everyone if you prefer. That way, people won’t just see a blank image and phone number when you message them.
Memoji and Animoji:
Memoji are getting a huge boost, with tons of new hair, make-up, and accessories. iOS 13 will automatically create a sticker pack from your Memoji that mimic the expressions of popular emoji. The Memoji editor and stickers are coming to all platforms with an A9 chip or better, though you will still need a device with Face ID to do the live face-tracking stuff.
Photos:
You can adjust the strength of Portrait Lighting in the Camera. There are lots of new adjustments for editing apps in Photos, and you can now edit videos as well, which includes rotating them. The Photos app gets a new browsing experience that uses intelligence to show your best, most relevant images by year, month, and day.
AirPod enhancements:
Share music with a second person’s AirPods by tapping phones together. Plus, Siri can now read your incoming messages as soon as they arrive, and you can respond without triggering Siri. It works with any third-party messaging app that supports SiriKit.
HomePod enhancements:
Bring your iPhone close to your HomePod to instantly hand off whatever you’re playing. Siri can play over 100,000 radio stations. HomePod also gets multi-user support, with the ability
to recognize multiple voices and use each person’s own Music, Reminders, Messages, Notes, and so on.
CarPlay improvements:
Apple’s biggest CarPlay update ever. A new dashboard puts your map next to your music and Siri smart suggestions, so you don’t have to flip back and forth. Siri doesn’t take over the entire display anymore, and it will work with third-party music and mapping apps.
Siri Shortcuts:
The Shortcuts app is now built into iOS 13 (so you don’t need to download it separately), and it includes a new personalized step-by-step way to create your own automations.
Siri’s new voice:
A new ‘Neural Text-to-Speech’ voice uses machine learning to create a completely artificial voice with more natural cadence and smoother-sounding complex words.
iPadOS
The iPad gets its own operating system. It’s based on the fundamentals of iOS and gets all the improvements of iOS 13, but there are enough new, iPad-only features that Apple has decided to give it its own name. Here are the highlights for the first iPadOS.
New Home screen:
A tighter grid of icons lets you put more stuff on the screen. You can pin widgets to keep them on the Home screen, too.
Slide Over improvements:
It’s easier to move between apps that are hovering over the right side of your screen in Slide Over mode. Just use it like you do newer multitasking on newer iPhones: drag up from the
bottom to see a list of all Slide Over apps, or drag left and right across the bottom to swap between them.
Split View improvements:
You can run the same app side by side with itself. See two different notes at the same time, or two Word documents.
Files app:
The Files app gets a handy new column view, iCloud Drive folder sharing, SMB network support, and USB drive support.
Safari:
On the iPad, Safari will display the desktop versions of sites, only optimized for the iPad size and touch. Safari also gets a download manager and 30 new keyboard shortcuts.
Fonts:
You can easily install new fonts by downloading directly from the App Store.
New multitouch features:
Grab and drag scroll bars. Move cursors by just touching and dragging. Directly drag on text to select it – no double-tapping or magnifying glass. Do a three-finger ‘close’ gesture to copy text, repeat it to cut text, and then do a threefinger ‘expand’ gesture to paste it. A three-finger swipe serves as a new undo gesture.
Apple Pencil:
The low 20ms latency has been reduced to a mere 9ms. There’s a redesigned Pencil tool palette, and a new PencilKit API for developers. Drag your pencil up from the corner of the screen to mark up anything on any app.
Compact keyboard:
Pinch the iPad’s keyboard with two fingers to get a small, iPhone-sized keyboard.
Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR
Apple finally unveiled its new Mac Pro desktop computer, which will be available this autumn. Prices start at $5,999 (£tbc) for the computer and $4,999 (£tbc) for the Pro Display XDR.
The Mac Pro features an all-metal design reminiscent of the old beloved ‘cheese grater’ Mac Pro. It sports an Intel Xeon processor with eight, 12, 16, 24, or 28 cores. There are 12 DIMM slots that allow for a maximum of 1.5 terabytes of ECC DDR4 system memory. There are eight PCI expansion slots, including four double-wide slots and four single-wide slots. Two of the doublewide slots are ‘MPX’ modules that deliver extra power.
There’s an extra half-length x4 PCIe slot with an I/O slot installed to add Thunderbolt and USB ports.
Apple built a brand-new hardware accelerator card called Afterburner that has an FPGA chip (a programmable processor) that is optimized to process ProRes and ProRes RAW video.
The Pro Display XDR is a 32in LCD with a 6K resolution of 6,016x3,384. It’s got true 10-bit colour and DCI-P3 colour gamut, a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and a sustained full-screen brightness of up to 1,000 nits, with a limited peak of up to 1,600 nits. The stand is sold separately for $999 (£tbc), or you can buy a VESA mount for $199 (£tbc).
macOS Catalina
MacOS 10.15 has its California-inspired name, and it’s Catalina. It’s biggest new feature is the ability for developers to easily deploy apps made for iOS, but Apple announced plenty of other new features.
iTunes breakup:
iTunes is going away, replaced by three more focused apps: Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple TV. The devices you used to manage and sync with iTunes will instead be managed in the Finder.
Sidecar:
This will let you use your iPad as a secondary display for your Mac, or as a graphics tablet in art apps, either wired or wirelessly.
Voice Control:
Control your Mac or iOS device entirely with your voice. It’s developed as an accessibility feature, but could be very useful for anyone.
Find My:
This feature combines Find My iPhone with Find My Friends, and is now available both on Mac and iOS. It can even find devices that are no longer connected to the network using secure Bluetooth beacons that are end-to-end encrypted and anonymous.
Activation Lock:
All Macs with a T2 security chip can have Activation Lock enabled. It works just as it does on iPhone or iPad, preventing a thief from ever being able to activate your device without your Apple ID.
Screen Time:
All the features already found in iOS are now brought to the Mac.
Project Catalyst:
Previously code-named ‘Marzipan’, this is a new technology that lets developers quickly and easily create Mac apps using the tools and techniques they use to make iPhone and iPad apps. Developers
can open any iPad-compatible project in Xcode and check the Mac checkbox. Xcode will automatically add Mac-specific features, giving developers a big head start. Developers can then add finishing touches to make it even better on the Mac.
AR and Swift tools for developers
Of course, WWDC is a developer conference. While Apple spends most of its keynote showing off features that users can appreciate, there were lots of breakout sessions throughout the week that looked at the new tools for developers.
During the keynote, Apple touched briefly on two specific areas: augmented reality (AR) and its Swift programming language.
RealityKit:
A new toolkit for developers who want to make AR apps but don’t know much about 3D
rendering. It incorporates rendering, camera effects, audio, physics, and more.
Reality Composer: A new app for developers that has a drag-and-drop interface to create AR scenes using a big library of already-made 3D objects and animations.
ARKit 3: The latest version of Apple’s AR toolkit is a big upgrade. It features new object and image detection, motion capture, and People Occlusion to integrate real people into AR scenes with automatic compositing.
SwiftUI: A totally new framework to make it easier for developers to build better interfaces with a lot less code. It will work across all Apple’s products, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, and even Apple Watch.